r-bomb

present singular third person r-bombs · participle present r-bombing · participle past r-bombed · past r-bombed

1. alternativeAlternative form of R-bomb.

present singular third person R-bombs · participle present R-bombing · participle past R-bombed · past R-bombed · alternative r-bomb · alternative R bomb

1. neologismslangtransitiveTo leave someone's text message on read without replying.

   Being r-bombed is roughhh

   2010 November 3, @victoriapand, Twitter, archived from the original on 16 May 2024

   5 more examples

   "Joe," Juan said. "You been r-bombing me." ¶ He turned around and faced Juan. ¶ "Not me," he said. "Dad's got my phone. Wants to know what I'm into."

   2015, Alfred R. Taylor, The Write Way to Get a Girlfriend, →ISBN, page 53

   When you leave a message as "read," but you don't reply, you've just R-bombed someone, and that's not very nice.

   2017 September 5, Azzura Lalani, “Hatfishing, cuffing and R-bombs: The new dating lingo”, in Toronto Star, Toronto, Ont.: Toronto Star Newspapers Ltd., →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 16 May 2024

   Certainly, an advantage to activating read receipts is that they hold us accountable to not only responding, but doing so in a timely fashion. While Apple has made activating them optional, platforms such as Facebook Messenger and Snapchat don't offer smartphone users the luxury of choosing blissful ignorance. Instead, we must confront the fact that our presumably busy texting partner did indeed "R-bomb" us.

   2018 February 13, Holly Cabrera, “Don't show me the (read) receipts”, in The McGill Tribune, archived from the original on 16 May 2024

   Whatever their line, Preece explains that a persistent R-bomber is typically disinterested in the person they're R-bombing but is simply too afraid or immature to admit it.

   2018 May 24, Olivia Petter, “R-bombing: The new dating trend you may have already experienced”, in The Independent, London: Independent News & Media, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 20 Oct 2023

   If you've ever seen those blue ticks on Whatsapp with no response, and become increasingly irate, you've been R-bombed.

   2018 May 26, Ellen Scott, “R-bombing is the new dating term you've likely already put up with”, in Metro, London: DMG Media, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 08 Nov 2022

   Synonyms: leave someone on read

plural R-bombs · alternative r-bomb · alternative R bomb

1. Any of various shocking or offensive words starting with the letter R.

   Cancer, John Mayer and "Please Don't Call Me Racist": Diffusing the R-Bomb

   2010 April 17, Molly Secours, “(article title)”, in HuffPost, archived from the original on 30 Nov 2023

   4 more examples

   The thirty minutes between her dropping the R-bomb [i.e., reproduction] and the bell for the end of the lesson dragged by with glacial slowness. She might as well not have been there, she felt, for all the attention that was paid.

   2009, Alex Coleman, Little Black Everything, Baldoyle; Dublin: Poolbeg, →ISBN, page 123

   When White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said a group of liberal activists were "fucking retarded," he was roundly condemned for dropping an R-bomb that way.

   2010, Ralph Keyes, Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms, New York: Little, Brown and Company, page 212

   Of course, one is in a state of constant improvement. A state of Racist Rehab, if you will. When things get messy on Facebook, and a bunch of us racists start dropping R-bombs on each other, I like to take the moral high ground and say, "I know. I'm also a racist, but I'm in recovery." In fact, it's hard to be anything else, having been raised in a country where race is the currency of any kind of success, where the class oppression common worldwide is so closely grafted to skin colour.

   2013, Hagen Engler, Marrying Black Girls for Guys Who Aren't Black, Johannesburg: MFBooks Joburg, →ISBN, page 19

   Yep, just to reinforce the point, she'd dropped the R-bomb. Anyone who was a child during the 1970s understands the knee-jerk horror created by the mere mention of rabies.

   2015, Sue Perkins, Spectacles: A Memoir, London: Michael Joseph, →ISBN, page 42

plural R-bombs · alternative r-bomb · alternative R bomb

1. literatureA relativistic kinetic weapon.

   2 more examples

   Suddenly, without warning, a massive swarm of relativistic kill vehicles, or R-bombs, suddenly emerged from interstellar space and systematically impacted on Earth and every Human settlements across the Solar System. In one, single decisive attack, most of Humanity was destroyed, and the rest of the book follows the survivors hiding across the Solar System in a bleak, desperate struggle for survival as the spaceships from the alien civilization that launched the missiles move in to finish the job, all the while trying to figure out WHY the aliens would pull such a horrific act of genocide on them.

   2013 June 5, SpaceMarine93, “"The Killing Star" - R-bombs and interstellar genocide”, in StarDestroyer.Net BBS, retrieved 01 Sep 2026

   Mr. Paterson is optimizing a more plausible scenario. His "poor man's R-bomb" is constrained by a particular exhaust velocity, and the question is how to squeeze the maximum kinetic energy into the payload. I'm not sure whether his analysis is correct, but it seems plausible. The optimum energy efficiency would actually be reached at an terminal velocity equal to the exhaust velocity. But that doesn't seem to be the objective of the poor man's R-bomb. The poor man's R-bomb seems to be limited by loaded mass rather than energy budget. You don't use any sacrificial propellant at all, you just use pure fuel at the maximum exhaust velocity you can manage all the way.

   2026 August 31 (last accessed), Isaac Kuo, quotee, “Exotic Weapons”, in Atomic Rockets, archived from the original on 30 Aug 2026